July 29, 2024 Issue

I’ve just finished reading Nick Paumgarten’s “Dead Reckoning,” in this week’s issue. What a wonderful piece of writing! It’s an account of his recent trip to the Sphere, in Las Vegas, to see a performance of Dead & Company, “the current permutation of the Grateful Dead, featuring two surviving members, Bob Weir and Mickey Hart, and the pop star John Mayer.” 

Paumgarten writes about his continuing obsession with the Grateful Dead (“Despite broadening taste, periodic bouts of embarrassment, and decades of personal growth and/or decay, my fascination with the music has somehow only deepened”). He describes the Sphere:

The Sphere is connected to the Venetian by an air-conditioned passageway. Outside, the building serves as an incandescent orbic billboard, with 1.2 million L.E.D.s, each containing four dozen diodes. Ad space, basically, or an electronic canvas in the round. Inside, it’s a performance venue, with about eighteen thousand seats arrayed under a vast dome that doubles as the world’s largest and highest-resolution L.E.D. screen. The sound system features some hundred and sixty thousand speakers, which allow engineers to direct discrete sounds at individual seats. The venue can also vibrate those seats and produce smells—an Odorama and an Orgasmatron in one.

He visits casino bars and talks with other Deadheads. One guy named Matty K. tells him, “This show at the Sphere was the best show I have ever seen. I was dead sober, not even a beer. It holds up to any Dead show ever.” In response, Paumgarten writes, “This was blasphemy, especially from a guy who’d been there for what I considered glory days. But I’d come across the Mayer mania before, and perhaps the Sphere had powers of persuasion I’d not yet encountered.”

As it turns out, the Sphere does have such powers. Paumgarten vividly describes his experience of the concert, which he attends with an old friend he calls “my wingman”:

An hour before showtime, we shuffled along the carpeted corridor from the Venetian, spilled out into the heat for a few minutes, then ducked into the orb. The exuberance of the thousands, as they rode escalators into an ambient, crepuscular glow in the Sphere’s cavernous ecto-chamber, was contagious, though the scale of the place felt a little like an affront to the gods. “Reminds me of ‘The Towering Inferno,’ ” my wingman said. We rode to the very top, to take in the enormity from above; the pitch of the stands reminded me of the precipitous upper deck in the old Yankee Stadium—step lightly. Soon we had our seats, our twenty-five-dollar craft beers, and, in spite of our skepticism, that familiar thrum of expectancy. The band went on at seven-thirty-five, right on time, like a puck drop.

He says of the show,

It’s all tightly choreographed, but the music still feels alive, improvised, viney. A not-unpropulsive jam scored a vista of the desert at night, a gesture toward the group’s 1978 trip to Egypt: a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree view of the Great Pyramids under a lunar eclipse, bats winging in the shadows of the Sphinx. Then, to the delight of the Mayerheads, a wanky “Sugaree,” under a shower of scarlet begonias. “What a showoff,” a guy behind me said.

“Keep showing off,” another responded.

Of the Sphere, Paumgarten writes,

The Sphere is a cutting-edge concert hall, a marvel of engineering and technology, a visual and auditory feast. It was like nothing I’d ever seen, a new frontier of live entertainment, and there were moments on both nights where some combination of sound and screen made me want to call everyone I knew, even those with no affection for anything Dead, and say what my editor had said to me: “Go!”

“Dead Reckoning” is a worthy companion to Paumgarten’s brilliant “Deadhead” (The New Yorker, November 26, 2012). I enjoyed it immensely. 

Top Ten New Yorker & Me: #4 "Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #1 'Deadhead' "

The Grateful Dead (Photo by Robert Altman)

This is the seventh post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is “Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #1 ‘Deadhead’ ” (October 24, 2019):

Nick Paumgarten’s “Deadhead” (The New Yorker, November 26, 2012) is a deep, funny, perceptive, stylish consideration of his obsession with the rock band Grateful Dead. A bumper sticker quoted in the piece – “Who are the Grateful Dead, and why do they keep following me?” – could stand as its epigraph. 

Paumgarten approaches his subject from at least five angles:

1. The tapes (“Even the compromised sound quality became a perverse part of the appeal”);

2. The music (“The music, even in the standard verse-chorus stretches, often had a limber, wobbly feel to it that struck many listeners as slovenly but others as sinuous and alive, open to possibility and surprise”);

3. The band (“The musicians were not virtuosos, in the sense of technical skill. But each was unique, peerless, sui generis”);

4. The fans (“There is a silent minority, though, of otherwise unobjectionable aesthetes who, as “Grateful Dead” has become a historical record, rather than a living creative enterprise, have found themselves rekindling a fascination with the band’s recorded legacy. These are the tapeheads, the geeks, the throngs of workaday Phil Schaaps, who approach the band’s body of work with the intensity and the attention to detail that one might bring to birding, baseball, or the Talmud”);

5. The shows (“No two shows were the same, although many were similar. Even on good nights, they might stink it up for a stretch, and on bad ones they could suddenly catch fire—a trapdoor springs open. Then, there were the weird inimitable gigs, the yellow lobsters. Variation was built into the music. They played their parts as if they were inventing them on the spot, and sometimes they were”).

But, most of all, it’s about the tapes. Paumgarten is a tapehead. He writes,

Each tape seemed to have its own particular note of decay, like the taste of the barnyard in a wine or cheese. You came to love each one, as you might a three-legged dog.

Later in the piece, he says,

So a drug-addled, rehearsal-averse, error-prone band of non-virtuosos perfected a state-of-the-art sound system that created a taping community that distributed a gigantic body of work that often came to sound as sloppy as some of the performances. Each had a character and odor of its own, a terroir. Some combination of the era, the lineup, the set list, the sound system, the recording apparatus, its positioning in the hall, the recorder’s sonic bias, the chain of custody, and, yes, the actual performance would render up a sonic aura that could be unique.

Paumgarten’s obsession takes him places. In the company of the Dead’s archivist, David Lemieux, he visits Warner Music Group’s giant warehouse, near Burbank, where the Dead’s vault of recordings is located (“There was a smell of vinegar—the disintegration of old magnetic audiotape. We wandered the aisles, tunnelling through music”). He interviews the band’s bass guitarist, Phil Lesh (“Lesh walked in alone. He’s a spry seventy-two, thin as a branch of manzanita, with fierce, appraising eyes, a quiet speaking voice, and the poor hearing of a guy who’s spent half his life standing in front of a stack of amps. He got a liver transplant in 1998. He was wearing jeans and an untucked button-down. He ordered beets”). He attends the performance of a Grateful Dead tribute band called Dark Star Orchestra (“It was embarrassing and pathetic, perhaps, to be going to see a tribute band unironically—my wife calls them the Dork Star Orchestra—yet it was a thrill to hear the music played well in a small room”). He seeks out the Dead’s longtime recording engineer, Betty Cantor-Jackson, and finds her working as a sound technician at a Methodist church in San Francisco (“She had on a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, and a pair of reading glasses propped on her head. She has long brown hair parted in the middle, a warm melancholic smile, and an air of broad-mindedness tinged with resentment”).

“Deadhead” brims with inspired sentences. (When I read, I underline noteworthy passages. Almost three-quarters of “Deadhead” is underlined.) I think my favorite is “On one shelf, I found a bunch of hand-labelled cassettes arrayed chronologically on a Stroh’s beer flat, as in the back seat of a Deadhead’s Datsun.”

You don't have to be a fan of the Grateful Dead to appreciate "Deadhead." You can read it, as I do, for the sheer pleasure of its writing.